Your language spoken here

Hyannis offers many chances to share languages. For examples, how would you like to have a colonoscopy or a C-section done by people who don’t understand the language you speak?

Ellen Chahey

ELLEN C. CHAHEY PHOTO

GOOD LISTENER – Ceci Phelan-Stiles, who directs interpretive services for Cape Cod Hospital and other affiliates of Cape Cod Healthcare, is a good listener.

Hyannis hospital, library ease communication

Hyannis offers many chances to share languages. For examples, how would you like to have a colonoscopy or a C-section done by people who don’t understand the language you speak?

Helping you through the medical maze in your own tongue is the work of Cecilia Phelan-Stiles, whose office is on the campus of Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis.

Born in Mexico, she speaks Spanish and English fluently. “I can defend myself in French,” she added in a typical way to describe modest language skill, and she said also that she understands Portuguese although she does not speak it.

Her father’s work transferred him and his young family to many places, she said, and one of those was California, where she got easy with English. She earned a college degree in international relations at the University of Alabama (“They speak a whole other language there”, she joked about the Deep South state).

After a short career with a newspaper that covers education, she heard that Cape Cod Hospital was looking for interpreters. She interviewed for the job and was hired, and eventually was offered the chance to direct interpretive services for Cape Cod Healthcare, the umbrella that oversees Cape Cod and Falmouth hospitals and the Visiting Nurse Association.

Phelan-Stiles can provide on-site translators in Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, and Italian. But thanks to technology, she can access about 150 medical interpreters, trained not only in language but also in the words used by doctors and nurses and in skills about patient privacy and comfort. She has charts posted around the hospitals with the names of languages displayed boldly; a patient only has to point to the one of interest and Phelan-Stiles can call up a service that allows her to make a three-way connection among the patient, the physician, and the interpreter.

Among the 150 languages the interpretive service offers are Shqip, Hmoob, Srpsko-Hrvatski, and Tagalog, among many others for which this newspaper’s software cannot produce the characters. Interpretative services, including for American Sign Language, are required by state and federal laws, as is the poster itself, and the interpreters take courses in anatomy and physiology, medical terminology, and medical interpretation; and also must serve 150 hours of internship. ”They’ve seen everything,” Phelan-Stiles said of the students as they complete their training.

Phelan-Stiles offered an example of why her job satisfies her: there was a patient in the emergency room, she said, whose mother tongue was Bulgarian. The patient, trying to accommodate the medical staff, said that she could speak with someone in Russian. But through the interpretive service, said Phelan-Stiles, the hospital was able to connect her with a Bulgarian-speaking medical interpreter. “You should have seen her smile,” said Phelan-Stiles, when the patient heard her own language over the speakerphone.

The interpreter said that her profession has been named as one of the major career opportunities for the next several years. ”I love it,” she said when asked if she would recommend her job to a young person. “You’re with a patient” whose language and culture you can interpret between a patient and the medical world, and the work involves language, culture, and even “being with a patient during a C-section if the patient is awake,” she said.

Besides the hospital, the library is another center of multilingualism in Hyannis. Mary Bianco, children’s librarian, and Carol Saunders, acting director, praised the Mango language software that Hyannis offers. Because Mango is not available through the CLAMS library-sharing network, a Mango borrower has to have a Hyannis library card for full access to the language program.

Bianco said that the Hyannis library offers many resources for learning languages, and that they can support a student’s individual needs. “We direct them to the right resources whether it’s grammar, pronunciation, prep for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or even resources for English-speaking early readers,” said Bianco, who noted that both Verizon and the American Library Association have helped to support language learning in Hyannis.

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